Chris's Blog

PowerShell

I love PowerShell and I really love to automate things! I recently started looking into leveraging Azure services for some automation tasks and discovered how powerful it could be. I also had a lot of fun doing it and wanted to share some of what I learned. Azure Automation is for scheduling tasks or scripts that run […]

Ever since I first started sharing scripts on my blog, I’ve had a bunch of people reach out to me with stories of how they’ve used my code in their projects or offering to collaborate with me on future versions. My intention has always been to make my scripts easily downloadable and ready to run – […]

I’m excited to announce the release of Connect-365! Back 2012, I put together a basic script with a GUI to simplify connecting to Exchange Online via remote PowerShell. I had never intended to make the script publicly available and it was just something I used myself. After a couple years I realized that it had […]

Yes! it is finally possible to connect to Exchange Online from PowerShell installed on MacOS. I noticed some tweets about this being possible on Linux earlier in the week so I thought I’d re-visit testing it on MacOS. PowerShell remoting has been available in the MacOs version since powershell-6.0.0-alpha.15, but it didn’t include the ability […]

If you are using Outlook 2016 on Windows or Mac you will have noticed the recent addition of a one-click ‘Archive’ button to the ribbon. The addition of the archive button was announced at the end of February, but seems to have caught a bunch of customers by surprise and there appears to be some […]

I’ve just published an updated version of my Connect-EXO.ps1 script. This version, (version 3.2) includes a very minor fix for those using German language keyboards. This update is the result of testing and feedback from the TechNet community and I wanted to thank all those involved. I have been planning some big updates to this […]

Early last year I wrote a post about encrypting script credentials using certificates. At the time, someone (thanks Dave Wyatt!) commented on the post suggesting a couple of alternative methods to encrypt and decrypt the data, in particular I was interested in the Protect-CmsMessage and Unprotect-CmsMessage cmdlets included in PowerShell 5.0. Now that PowerShell 5.0 […]

I’ve just published an updated version of my Connect-EXO.ps1 script. Version 3.1 includes the ability to connect to the Office 365 Security & Compliance Center. Based on the options selected it will connect to either or all services with Exchange Online being the only one selected by default. Here is a screenshot of the new interface: The update […]

The move to Office 365 almost always requires changes to existing operational processes. One of the processes that inevitably requires an update is the provisioning process and the extent of these changes will differ from organization to organization and depend on the maturity of your identity lifecycle management process. In many environments, license assignment can […]

I recently published an updated version of my Connect-EXO.ps1 script. Version 3.0 includes the option to connect to Azure AD. Based on the options selected it will connect to either or both services, here is a screenshot of the new interface: The update has been published to the TechNet Gallery, it can be downloaded by […]